Well's Hell

According to one dindshenchas,
a hero, Riach, constructs a house
over a well in which he has placed
the severed heads of warriors he
has slain in battle. the presence
of the heads seems to magically
affect the water which becomes
highly dangerous. In order to prevent
it from rising up against him, Riach
constructs a building over it in
which it can be contained. It
eventually rises up and drowns him.

-- Ann Ross, Pagan Celtic Britain

—Well, that’s how growing goes.
From this chair and others like
it down the years I’ve sat and
culled tales and talismans in
notebooks like this one, & rounded
that skull-rabblement within the
well-spine of a poem, again and
again and always yet again.
Thousands of these cold fingerlings
creep the wilderness between this
world and one betwixt, of equal
parts desire and dream and waves
on uteral beaches I’ve walked
and plundered. I’ve launched a
thousand coracles, each leaving
home behind & sailing toward the
first isle that affords a backwards
glance upon no land I know. Barked
a thousand ripe articulations
of a motion of an ocean like the
lubrications of my mother’s
salt ovations, that first flooding
celebration which lead me here
to this, this backwards cerebration
yearning for ensouling washes
of pure merry blue. Such siloing
of psalms though freights a
cost, for now a thousand skulls
bump and clamor in me,
like seals, parleying news
of Gods from ichor-darkened,
frozen pews. Untold legions of virgin
pages have been penned and plowed
by this rogering pen, whose heat
and furrow comes from that
balled skull notched into
the lintel chattering I am,
I am, I am, each time I
wander through ... Timbers
creak here at midnight, ravaged
by an unseen wind whose father
is lower than all waters; he’s
enraged at the audacity of
repeated rhymes & exacts a price
in the door I’ll one day reach
then open & through which all locks
and dams are broken and pure
waters avenge the whole cathedral,
brick by page by keel by tongue,
spiralling this Pequod down
to join Chartres and New Grange
and the shrine of Willendorf,
flowers in the boneyard of Oran
far under the one we know. and
show off to summer tourists.
One day gone. On moony nights
beyond when the waters are calm
you may see my once-livid spire
of words, glowing like an elvish
ire, the hat of a pope gone down
out ut of view, a lonely bell
tolling what no shore quelled.